Well, there are places we could put them that would be zero (additional) environmental impact -- roofs, walls, cars, etc. If we could make them even 50% efficient, merely putting them on the entire roof of every house could probably cover most of the energy needed by that house. If we could make them strong enough, roads and parking lots and such could be covered with them, stuff like that. (Not likely to ever be practical, of course.)
(Alas, even covering a car with 100% efficient solar cells (impossible, of course) wouldn't provide enough energy to power that car even in full sunlight. At least not at car speeds -- solar powered bicycles/tricycles are almost practical with today's technology, as long as you don't mind a big cover full of solar cells.)
I seem to recall reading somewhere that we could provide the entire human race's current energy requirement with solar panels (using today's technology) on less than 1% of the Earth's surface, and it even suggested some places -- mostly in deserts near the Equator. Aha... Found it. It doesn't explicitly say 1%, but it doesn't look like much...
I don't think oil/electricity price is the sole or even primary factor behind the renewables craze.
Sure seems like it is...
(I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying that the massive recent increases in the price of energy is probably the #1 contributer to the recent interest in alternative energy sources, and that's a very large part of the `renewables craze')
2025 is still a long ways away. If gas was still $1.50 US/gal (US price, of course), a lot more people would be happy to not worry about some 2025 target...
Also, these people don't seem to have had a single race yet. Their promo video appears to be footage from a video game. (Well, that and Star Wars clips.)
Perhaps it's a bit premature for NASA to look to them for guidance...
I like your broken toilet analogy (which is rare -- I usually hate analogies), but it would have been better if you'd described a bug as your toilet breaking, and a security bug as your neighbor being able to break your toilet at will.
All bugs bite everyone (unless they're a bug that only happens on certain hardware or software or under certain conditions, of course.)
Security bugs are important, yes, but so are other bugs. So there's a bug that allows a local user to be come root, and there's a bug that will occasionally trash my xfs filesystem. Guess which bug is more important to me to fix? The only case where I might feel differently would be if I ran a general use shell account box, in which case I'd probably be screaming for both fixes rather than screaming for one and asking nicely for the other. (And to be fair, for a general use shell box, I'd probably go OpenBSD rather than Linux anyways.)
Just because a bug has security implications, that doesn't mean it suddenly becomes more important than all other bugs that don't.
Actually, I'm in a position to be more precise. Looking at who posted to Usenet in June, the Big-8 saw posts from around 60,000 unique email addresses, and alt.* (without alt.binaries.*) saw posts from 129,000 unique addresses.
It's hard to say how many email addresses one person uses, or how many of them are spammers using random addresses, but it certainly does seem to be more than a few people.
Actually, let me remove email addresses only seen once -- then the figures become 54k and 50k. And looking at addresses used 5 or more times, it's 26k and 30k.
Still doesn't look at readers (only posters), and there's a lot of totally invalid addresses in here, but it's a guess. Obviously Usenet isn't dead yet.
As for my username, clicking on it will give you the answer you seek -- top right corner. (Not sure how Paris Island or West Coast would turn into MC...)
Yes, it's on the decline, but there's still thousands of people who use the text group to have discussions every day, and many more who only use the binaries groups.
Some groups have been abandoned to the spammers. But not all.
People often have problems defining kiddie porn, but they know it when they see it... and many, when they see pictures of a naked family having a bbq... they know it's kiddie porn. (now, the actual law may (and actually does, in the US) say something else, but that doesn't matter -- they know this is kiddie porn, and off they go on their crusade against it.)
Now, that works for the naturism group. But if the name has `erotica' in it, that suggests that it's actual pornography. As for alt.binaries.erotica.teen.female, well, that group is probably mostly full of pictures of 18 and 19 year old girls, and that's not child porn. Looking up the mclt group, it means `My Collection of Lolitas and Teens'... which also seems to like 'em young, but as for how young, I don't know, and I don't feel like checking.
Either way, if they've found child porn in 88 groups, it seems stupid to drop the entire alt.* hierarchy because of it -- just drop those 88 groups.
Yes, if the most points you can score is around five, then you're fucked and it's unbeatable, yes.
However, that's not likely to be the reality. The reality is more likely to be that for each point, the computer has a 75% chance of making it and you have a 25% change of making it. So in the vast majority of cases, the computer is going to outscore you 3:1... but if you were to have an incredible string of luck, and hit your 25% 5 times in a row -- the computer probably couldn't catch up before you hit 7. Yes, the odds are certainly not in your favor, but winning (reaching 7 points first) is not impossible.
Now, as I understand it, the computer does learn, so it's skill at playing you should increase over time, but humans can learn too.
Either way, if you can ever score on the computer, then it's not unbeatable. It might require incredible luck, but if you can get lucky enough to score once, you can get lucky enough to score seven times in a row. (Though it seems to me that you ought to be able to make a computer that is unbeatable, just make it fast enough to deal with the fastest possible puck moving in the most crazy possible way. Then you'd never score on it, unless something actually broke/failed.)
The most awesome chess computer of all time, the one that has analyzed every single possible game, and knows every ramification of every move... you'll never be able to beat it. The best you'll be able to do is tie it with a similar computer. But it will still lose chess pieces, that's part of the game and is unavoidable.
But air hockey is different. The board doesn't change from point to point. If your robot is fast enough to never miss a puck that's under a certain speed, and the puck never can reach that speed... then you'll never score. Even once.
Humans can still score on it occasionally, so they're `beating' it in that sense. But overall, it still wins more than it loses.
Statistically speaking, if it averages 3x the score of it's opponents, a human should be able to beat it once in a while -- it just hasn't happened yet.
What's sad is that his doing it was a pre-requisite for his lighter sentence -- had he not done it, he wouldn't be able to lead them to the body, and so he'd have to serve his entire sentence (unless Nina showed up, of course.)
And in a similar vein, I thought I was only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon? Or was that Paris Hilton? Either way, *70* degrees seems very excessive!
It took me 10 years of school to get two degrees... 70 would take... a long time.
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Well, there are places we could put them that would be zero (additional) environmental impact -- roofs, walls, cars, etc. If we could make them even 50% efficient, merely putting them on the entire roof of every house could probably cover most of the energy needed by that house. If we could make them strong enough, roads and parking lots and such could be covered with them, stuff like that. (Not likely to ever be practical, of course.)
(Alas, even covering a car with 100% efficient solar cells (impossible, of course) wouldn't provide enough energy to power that car even in full sunlight. At least not at car speeds -- solar powered bicycles/tricycles are almost practical with today's technology, as long as you don't mind a big cover full of solar cells.)
I seem to recall reading somewhere that we could provide the entire human race's current energy requirement with solar panels (using today's technology) on less than 1% of the Earth's surface, and it even suggested some places -- mostly in deserts near the Equator. Aha ... Found it. It doesn't explicitly say 1%, but it doesn't look like much ...
Sure seems like it is ...
(I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying that the massive recent increases in the price of energy is probably the #1 contributer to the recent interest in alternative energy sources, and that's a very large part of the `renewables craze')
2025 is still a long ways away. If gas was still $1.50 US/gal (US price, of course), a lot more people would be happy to not worry about some 2025 target ...
I think you're thinking of Digg ...
It's not even really clear what the difference is between a jet and a rocket, or if it even matters.
It sort of looks like in general a jet engine uses air from the atmosphere, and a rocket carries both fuel and oxidizer with it.
Either way, if it goes fast, looks fast and flame comes out the back ... that's what matters.
The shuttle is more glider than rocket.
Also, these people don't seem to have had a single race yet. Their promo video appears to be footage from a video game. (Well, that and Star Wars clips.)
Perhaps it's a bit premature for NASA to look to them for guidance ...
I like your broken toilet analogy (which is rare -- I usually hate analogies), but it would have been better if you'd described a bug as your toilet breaking, and a security bug as your neighbor being able to break your toilet at will.
All bugs bite everyone (unless they're a bug that only happens on certain hardware or software or under certain conditions, of course.)
Security bugs are important, yes, but so are other bugs. So there's a bug that allows a local user to be come root, and there's a bug that will occasionally trash my xfs filesystem. Guess which bug is more important to me to fix? The only case where I might feel differently would be if I ran a general use shell account box, in which case I'd probably be screaming for both fixes rather than screaming for one and asking nicely for the other. (And to be fair, for a general use shell box, I'd probably go OpenBSD rather than Linux anyways.)
Just because a bug has security implications, that doesn't mean it suddenly becomes more important than all other bugs that don't.
His joke was funnier than yours.
Actually, I'm in a position to be more precise. Looking at who posted to Usenet in June, the Big-8 saw posts from around 60,000 unique email addresses, and alt.* (without alt.binaries.*) saw posts from 129,000 unique addresses.
It's hard to say how many email addresses one person uses, or how many of them are spammers using random addresses, but it certainly does seem to be more than a few people.
Actually, let me remove email addresses only seen once -- then the figures become 54k and 50k. And looking at addresses used 5 or more times, it's 26k and 30k.
Still doesn't look at readers (only posters), and there's a lot of totally invalid addresses in here, but it's a guess. Obviously Usenet isn't dead yet.
As for my username, clicking on it will give you the answer you seek -- top right corner. (Not sure how Paris Island or West Coast would turn into MC ...)
Yeah, if I was going to post a load of tripe like that, I'd do it anonymously too.
You obviously don't know Usenet very well.
Yes, it's on the decline, but there's still thousands of people who use the text group to have discussions every day, and many more who only use the binaries groups.
Some groups have been abandoned to the spammers. But not all.
Usenet > alt.binaries.*
TWRR dropped Usenet because they were sending too much money to Newshosting for their outsourced news server, and Cuomo gave them a convenient excuse.
People often have problems defining kiddie porn, but they know it when they see it ... and many, when they see pictures of a naked family having a bbq ... they know it's kiddie porn. (now, the actual law may (and actually does, in the US) say something else, but that doesn't matter -- they know this is kiddie porn, and off they go on their crusade against it.)
Now, that works for the naturism group. But if the name has `erotica' in it, that suggests that it's actual pornography. As for alt.binaries.erotica.teen.female, well, that group is probably mostly full of pictures of 18 and 19 year old girls, and that's not child porn. Looking up the mclt group, it means `My Collection of Lolitas and Teens' ... which also seems to like 'em young, but as for how young, I don't know, and I don't feel like checking.
Either way, if they've found child porn in 88 groups, it seems stupid to drop the entire alt.* hierarchy because of it -- just drop those 88 groups.
alt.binaries.* came later.
Yes, if the most points you can score is around five, then you're fucked and it's unbeatable, yes.
However, that's not likely to be the reality. The reality is more likely to be that for each point, the computer has a 75% chance of making it and you have a 25% change of making it. So in the vast majority of cases, the computer is going to outscore you 3:1 ... but if you were to have an incredible string of luck, and hit your 25% 5 times in a row -- the computer probably couldn't catch up before you hit 7. Yes, the odds are certainly not in your favor, but winning (reaching 7 points first) is not impossible.
Now, as I understand it, the computer does learn, so it's skill at playing you should increase over time, but humans can learn too.
Either way, if you can ever score on the computer, then it's not unbeatable. It might require incredible luck, but if you can get lucky enough to score once, you can get lucky enough to score seven times in a row. (Though it seems to me that you ought to be able to make a computer that is unbeatable, just make it fast enough to deal with the fastest possible puck moving in the most crazy possible way. Then you'd never score on it, unless something actually broke/failed.)
But air hockey is different. The board doesn't change from point to point. If your robot is fast enough to never miss a puck that's under a certain speed, and the puck never can reach that speed ... then you'll never score. Even once.
In short, your analogy falls short.
Humans can still score on it occasionally, so they're `beating' it in that sense. But overall, it still wins more than it loses.
Statistically speaking, if it averages 3x the score of it's opponents, a human should be able to beat it once in a while -- it just hasn't happened yet.
Yes, I realized that. `Never trust anything that bleeds for 3 days a month and lives'. Doesn't mean I have to respond in the same vein, however.
Nah, just another clumsy guy who likes to play with sharp things.
It's just more circumstantial evidence -- by itself, not very convincing, but all combined, enough to convict him even without a body.
What's sad is that his doing it was a pre-requisite for his lighter sentence -- had he not done it, he wouldn't be able to lead them to the body, and so he'd have to serve his entire sentence (unless Nina showed up, of course.)
I've bled many times, and a few times I've bled a lot. Still not dead ...
It did kill my files.
Trust me ... she can't really tell the difference once you get past one million miles.
And in a similar vein, I thought I was only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon? Or was that Paris Hilton? Either way, *70* degrees seems very excessive!
It took me 10 years of school to get two degrees ... 70 would take ... a long time.